Songs of Sea and Sky
by BlackEyedGirl
Summary: Lullabies to stop the cradles falling, to bring the children back to earth. To make the parents let us go, to make them hold on tight. Huck's choices at fifteen are not the ones his father would make for him, but Toby is not sure he can question them.


**Title:** Songs of Sea and Sky  
**Fandom:** The West Wing  
**Characters:** Toby&Huck (and other Wyatts, Zieglers, and Wyatt-Zieglers)  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Genre:** Angst/Drama  
**Length:** 1,700 words  
**Disclaimer:** All belongs to Sorkin and Wells.  
**Spoilers:** Let's say for the whole show, although you'd be hard pushed to get any specific spoilers out of this from beyond S4.  
**Summary:** Lullabies to stop the cradles falling, to bring the children back to earth. To make the parents let us go, to make them hold on tight. Huck's choices at fifteen are not the ones his father would make for him, but Toby is not sure he has the right to question them.

* * *

"I'm going to be a pilot, Dad." And that was the first Toby heard of it. 

"Why?"

"I like to fly," Huck answered, and Toby saw the dream of skies in his son's dark gaze.

"You understand that actually flying the planes isn't the same as just riding one over here?"

"Yes, Dad," Huck said quietly, no anger or defensiveness in his voice. So hard to stay angry at a child who never protested a rebuke; he forced Toby to mildness to see if that, perhaps, would make the boy explain himself. "Uncle David was an astronaut," Huck said; a voice now much younger than his fifteen years, reminding his father that this was not the first of his blood he had not understood.

David had flown all the way into space to see what would happen to the newts he had watched with wide magnified eyes when he was a child; when he had placed their tank in the dirt outside so they could see the sunshine. He had taken them into space with him because their tiny ears were like his own - the most fantastic of careers in the most prosaic of ways. David's love was in the earth, in his family and his home; he flew into the skies so he could come back again.

Huck, though, wanted to fly so he would never have to touch the earth. Toby remembered Huck as a little boy, at the top of the stairs with his arms outstretched, as if a stray breeze might carry him aloft. But it was Toby he had leapt to – wrapping his airplane arms tight around his father's chest. Now his son wanted the gust of wind to let him rise up, to eschew all earthly ties. Toby can hear the rushing in his ears – this is what fear sounds like. If he leaves he will not come back.

It was Molly that Toby had always feared would be an air spirit. His little girl whose dancer-quick feet barely graced the earth as she walked. He had two sisters, and still he had not known what to do with a daughter. Molly had made it easy for him – she wanted his love, demanded it with full voice, and hands grasping for his own; her birthright. When he gives her this, unsure why she sees it as such a gift, that is enough. She calls him Daddy in a way that aches deep in his heart, as if she knows that no one else can ever claim that spot again. His daughter was not air but fire; she stood in front of him with cheeks flushed and fists clenched, all of her mother's quick passion. Molly wanted to be a lawyer – Sam had already promised her a trip into his offices – ready to save the world by herself if she must. Toby suspected, though, that she would have appreciated her brother's help. Huck and Molly often regarded each other with loving incomprehension, but he could see where they fitted; two broken halves of their parents broken marriage. Molly believed in Huck's worth as strongly as her own, in all the ways Huck could not see it in himself. Huck, in turn, took his sister's chin and turned her head upwards, gifting his practical twin with poetry and a place in his philosophy. For Molly, Huck would deign to come back to earth again; she was the only person who could pull his dreamer son back down.

It was never Toby, then, who could be his son's anchor. His fears for his baby-girl were that he would douse her fire; damage her in some way that he could not see, and could not predict. Or that someone else would – some boy with no idea of the delicacy of the heart he broke – and Toby would be unable to protect her. But it is Huck, it transpires, that he cannot protect; his son who wishes so strongly not to be his father that he is running away from anyone who might make that happen. Just as his father did before.

He cannot joke, as the other fathers do, about his children flying the nest. He has never had that right, he has never been there for them to fly from him. He had not convinced their mother to marry him, and he has not been there for them as they deserved – his son's flight is his punishment, and he cannot complain then that he does not understand it. Toby had punished his father for his absence by leaving himself, by carving the wounds his mother and brother would not, in retaliation for every tear they had shed. Toby has upset Huck's mother, and broken the heart of his sister, and Huck will hold for them the anger they have long let go. He has broken Huck's heart too, little boy who didn't cry even when he was three and thought his father left him. Huck will do the same thing his father did, thinking it is different because none of his reasons are the same. Huck does not think of himself as angry - if called upon to name himself, it is his mother's word of sad that he would choose.

Huck is the clear blue sky to Toby's furious waves; he looks into his son and sees himself reflected back again, rippled lines made straight and fragile.

-

"You sure about this?" Huck's father asked him.

"Yeah, Dad, I'm sure."

"You're sure you wouldn't maybe like to be a lawyer like your sister? Or some other career that stays mostly on the ground?"

"I'm sure, Dad."

Huck was fifteen now, and old enough to know that he loved his father, and would never forgive him for leaving. Molly could not understand that. She loved Dad with all of her, and forgave him everything as though her tears washed it away. She loved Huck, and she loved both their parents, and saw nothing more difficult than that. Huck had never loved anyone in that way - where love was the undoing of anger.

He saw in his father all that he could have for himself and didn't want. That his father, too, had never forgiven his mother for leaving, but loved her still. That love for him was bound with anger and loss so tightly that he would never untangle them. Huck knew that his father looked at his son and saw himself looking back. Huck looked at his father and saw the self he needed to take to the air to escape. The same starting point, perhaps, but put together differently. Huck ran from what his father ran towards, and both of them felt guilty for it. His father was a genius, everyone said so. They said that Huck was one too, the way he thought, and the way he sometimes wrote. He had made his mother look at him, eyes huge and surprised, when his essay won a prize. She had put it on the fridge, because that was what mothers did, but when she thought he had left, she pulled it down again to read, chewing on her lip. He did not want her to see his father in him when she looked.

But he could no more help that than Molly could help that she looked like their mother. Side-by-side, he and Molly looked just like the twins they were. But against their parents, it was obvious that their family split down the middle. Except it was Molly who was captured, though fifteen and half-grown, wrapping her skinny arms around Dad in all the pictures. Huck who came to sit with his mother and a book, her talk in the background washing the worst of the noise away. Nevertheless, Molly was the one who ended up in the Principal's office when their teacher was foolish enough to criticise Congressman Wyatt's voting record, and Huck gets a split lip defending his father from the charge of treachery. Least understood does not mean least loved.

Huck does not know where he fits in the map he draws for himself in the skies overhead. Distant in the heavens is his grandfather, who had marked his son and grandson indelibly. Somewhere off to one side is the uncle he wishes, in a way he cannot explain, that he had known before. Aunts and cousins he has never seen, a grandmother he has never heard about. And then his father, shining so bright that Huck feels himself dim by contrast. His mother and his sister are there too, of course, who have carved out a place near his father, one by clinging tight and one by pulling away. But it is Huck who finds his star twinned with his father's; when Toby had fallen, he pulled Huck too.

It is only the falling he cares about, not the shining. Huck has never known what to do when he sits with his father, how to ask for what he wants. He has never wanted any recognition but his father's, who does not think that Huck desires it. The father will look at the son and see a world that needs mending, will look at himself and see someone not suitable to be a mentor or a future. The life that he does not want Huck to have, and does not want to doom him to. From his vantage point, high enough and far away, Huck can see clearly now how it worked. His father was the standard Huck measured himself against; the standard that Dad wanted him to better and Huck didn't know if he could reach. They will work it out someday soon – he is not his father, but he is his father's son and his father is his measure of a man even so. One day he would sing down into the ocean, and instead of being carried away on the wind, his father's voice would call back.

"Okay then," Toby said.

"Okay?"

"Whatever makes you happy, kid. That's what we'll do."

Toby wrapped strong arms around Huck and pulled him close. Huck dipped his head to fit it under his father's chin, and felt the slow breathing like a tide under his heart. He remembered thinking, back when he was very small, how cunningly the sea and sky fit together, without the stretch of white paper in all the other children's drawings. They ran alongside each other, sea and sky, the one reflecting the other, on and on until the reflections blurred; the man and the boy, the poet and the dreamer, a corridor of light.

* * *

FIN. 


End file.
